Could, But Won't
by Ditey
Summary: Nathan, somehow, is understanding her garbled fragments and accepts it with a smile. Haley smiles too, it's just what she does when Nathan is around.


Could But Won't  
  
By: Ditey  
  
---  
  
When Nathan gets a 92 on his history test, Haley, in her excitement, will congratulate him in a loose embrace, and Nathan will return the gesture by softly touching his lips to her neck.  
  
It will send shivers to the tips of her fingers and he will lean back, gently stroking her visage with coarse fingers from years of atheletics, and his vulnerable eyes will meet hers and..  
  
Or maybe the same eyes just search Haley's face on a Monday afternoon. Her gaze is fixtated on her wrist, one hand fiddling with the beads of the bracelet hidden underneath the sleeve of her jacket. Nathan clears his throat, unsure if she is thinking about his question, or just spacing out like he so often does during math class.   
  
"Hey," he says, reaching out and lightly touching her hand. The fingers are rough and the feel of them against her skin is exactly the same as what's in her head, except much, much better. Much more real.   
  
It's all it takes for Haley to startle back into what's in front of her. A calculus textbook opened to problems so complicated, they hurt to look at, and Nathan's inquiring eyes, which the same holds true for, but in a different way.  
  
"Sorry," she mumbles, "which one were we on again?" He points to number twenty seven, and explains his work, messy and complicated but nevertheless correct. The red checks next to every problem is not his only praise; Haley is unable to make herself stop talking once she opens her mouth, and rambles on about how much progress he's making.  
  
He beams, and it's about the only thing more beautiful to look at than his eyes. It makes her want to spout pathetic phrases like, 'if everything I said made you smile, I would talk forever.'  
  
"Go ahead to the next page. One through thirty, odds." He groans, "can't we go on to something else? I don't think I can stand to see another function again," but Haley stands by her syllabus in a totalitarian way, which earns her facetious nicknames from Nathan.  
  
She creeps up the sleeve of her jacket a bit more, until she can see the bracelet with its plastic beads she's memorized the shape of. She fingers the elastic while thinking back to herself, wondering where she left off in her reverie.   
  
She should stop it. She should stop thinking about kissing a guy less than three feet away from her, taking off the shirt that's brushing her elbow, and any other peverse thoughts her mind has come up with lately. She should stop looking forward to these things as a way to spend time with Nathan and as what it's supposed to be, keeping Lucas out of trouble. She should stop finding the fact that their hands collided while picking up a paper so important, that she forgets to turn off the stove at the cafe.  
  
She should.  
  
But she can't.  
  
**  
  
The Hallmark store carries exactly four types of cards. Birthday, Anniversary, Get Well Soon, and Love.   
  
There's an old lady with a shopping cart in one side of the store, giving Haley darting glances that makes her feel uncomfortable. Haley ambles through the aisles, pretending to be interested in a teddy bear stauette that renditions James Brown at the touch of a button.  
  
He opens up to her. She can replay conversations on a moment's notice, a side effect of having freakishly good memory. She can remember Nathan's early rants, of having to do an extra lap in basketball practice because of 'unsportsman-like behavior'. She giggled when he had said that, because he had slowed his voice down and added that Whitey twang, and made air quotes. She quietly belittled the school's athletics department, voicing her happiness of not having to take another year of P.E and getting an extra period of study hall instead.  
  
"God," he said, "is studying, like, all you do?"   
  
She said, "Well, there's pencil sharpening, sock folding, and I do love a rousing game of chess," and he smiled once he caught the sarcasm. Silence followed as he began to read the first few lines of a monologue, and Haley watched with amusement as his eyebrows crinkled up and his eyes focused in a deep concentration reserved mostly for making the winning basket.  
  
He muttered under his breath, "I wish Shakespeare would just die and leave me alone." He looked up and couldn't understand Haley's smile.  
  
-  
  
She trails her finger along the section of love cards. She scrunches her nose at the gaudy ones with glitter that sticks to her fingerprint. She bites her lip at the sexy ones with chocolate and high heeled shoes, covers of exotic sunsets with umbrellaed drinks and a blank inside.  
  
She's picking up some one with a witty one liner on the front, when a salesperon who seems to have nothing better to do asks if she needs help, giving her the 'ah, yes, to be young and in love' eye. Haley then realizes how mortifying it is to be given that eye by a attendee of Prom '76, and she can feel her cheeks beginning to burn up. She quickly puts the card back on the shelf, causing it to bend a bit and shuffle envelopes around, and mumbles a 'no'. She's desperate for someone to understand, but not so much to listen on musings of the woman's high school sweetheart.  
  
-  
  
"You and Peyton. The most perfect couple, yes?" She kept her voice a little low, Nathan and her were in the library's conference room and the old librarian would check up on them every so often, to make sure their free period was really spent tutoring and not with, 'unmentionable diversions'. Nathan had laughed and Haley gave the, 'no, of course not, what on earth are you smoking?' look.   
  
Nathan looked up from the review worksheet and tightened his lips. "What?"  
  
"I'm just saying," she tucked some hair behind her ear unsurely, "I mean. It's just like you two are meant to be enclosed in a little glass snowglobe somewhere."  
  
He quasi-rolled his eyes, which she noticed but not because she was looking into his eyes or anything. "Cause she's the cheerleader and I'm the jock." He didn't ask but stated.  
  
"Well. Yeah," she admitted, "in a cliched sort of way." He nodded his head slightly, and she recognized it, it was the same one he gave his friends surrounded at the lunch table, a distant sort of agreement as if shaking his head would shatter the moment.  
  
"I guess so."  
  
The moment was uncomfortable, and Haley cursed herself from digressing from variables to his personal life. Polynomials, she could handle. She was not entirely sure she could go for this, '7th Heaven very-special-episode' thing.  
  
"You don't have to be a cliche if you don't want to be." She said it kind of fast, and she certainly didn't think about it before she said it. She certainly didn't think about moving her head about two inches closer to him with the last five words.  
  
"It's not like I can change it." He looked up from the textbook at her, and the sudden movement and deepness of his gaze just about made Haley have a heart attack, and squeal, not in that order.   
  
"You know, everything's a cliche. This school is a cliche, small town hiding a dark past, and everyone in it. It's just supposed to be that way. I'm the jock, and I'm supposed to get the blonde cheerleader, not the brain of a brunette." He somewhat gestured to the corresponding people, a little flick of of the wrist towards Haley on the last phrase. She sank into her chair, hoping it was a portal to an alternate dimension where there never was a Nathan Scott.  
  
Silence. But not the awkward kind. The kind in which you're thinking too much, so out of yourself and somewhere else that you don't even notice that nobody's talking, that you're looking down on the floor at nothing, or trying to find an answer by wringing your hands.   
  
"Yeah," she whispered, and even the quietness of the library could't carry the voice to his ears.  
  
The librarian opened the door and gave them an approving smile before closing the door, and its creaking snapped them out of their reveries.   
  
"I think our time's up," she said, not with the least bit of resentment. He got up after gathering his papers, and she skipped lunch just sitting there in the conference room for twenty minutes. The bell rang and she willed herself to stand and make it on time to sixth period.  
  
-  
  
Haley grabs a not so fancy anniversary card with no 'twenty five years and going strong!' transcribed on the inside, pays and leaves. She should stop by the library and so some research for her project on Sudan. But she can't stop biting her lips, accidently bumping into so many people finding her thoughts and her way home, it's not even funny.  
  
She should.   
  
But she can't.  
  
***  
  
Haley's almost ashamed to be carrying around the card the next day. She practiced her handwriting for ten minutes, and good chunk of that spent perfecting her signature. The skinny and scrawly letters with wild jagged lines, eventually morphed into soft and loopy ones, with curvey S's and Y's.   
  
She won't admit she spent Spanish class planning out the note, while the rest of her classmates were conjugating verbs. Yes, she planned out the note, all twenty five words of it. The quote is *not* something she has floating at the top of her head, but something that took twenty minutes of scouring 'quotations.com' to find, the perfect quote that wasn't cheesy and, 'I'm Haley, tutor-girl!' or too, 'Hey there sexy, I. Want. You' and Brooke-ish.  
  
She feels extremely silly pulling out the kit after their tutoring session, after many laughs that got interrupted by 'shhh!'s. She still debates handing it over, telling herself she could just forget she spent thirty minutes in the card shop, an hour total for its content, and a few minutes giving it 'extra preparations', which was really giving the envelope soft kisses, pretending it was Nathan, which at the very least would find its way to his hands, and spritzing it with perfume.  
  
She's already got it out, and Nathan's giving her a funny look, like 'I don't recall agreeing to go fly fishing.'   
  
"It's a study kit," she explains, and of course Nathan is going, 'oh, of course, I know exactly what you mean! I give people study kits all the time.'  
  
"For your history test. Next week."  
  
Two fifteen, to be exact. In your desk. With a pencil. Which is handily included in this kit.  
  
Nathan, somehow, is understanding her garbled fragments and accepts it with a smile. Haley smiles too, it's just what she does when Nathan is around. They leave together, Nathan walks her over to Art, even though his fine arts room isn't in the same hallway. She imagines what it must be like to see her, Haley James and Nathan Scott, walking down the hallway, laughing. The thought gives her a picture that she really enjoys.  
  
She should be expecting the worst, not a wonderful fairy tale ending in which he gives her a kiss outside the classroom with a 'I'll see you later, Ms. James', with a promise of a Friday night, and in this daydream, there's usually an equal amount of talking at a local Starbucks and making out in her room.  
  
But she should get herself prepared for the truth, which is possibilities of him passing around the note in the locker room, reading it aloud trying to be poetic, snickering after every sentence, and Lucas getting so mad his left eyebrow hitches and his lips purse together.  
  
She should.   
  
But she can't.  
  
***  
  
Haley waits until she gets to the cafe to cry. Somehow, in her mind, it makes her seem more dignified. She doesn't want to be seen crying while crossing the street, because all she needs is someone to tell her mother, who will come next to her and ask which boy was enough for a 'James' to cry over.  
  
She tries to open the door, the wind bites at her hand but the key won't turn, and she finally gets it open. The windchimes go crazy at the motion. The tinkling soon fades but they don't leave her mind. She looks around at the empty cafe.  
  
And then she cries.  
  
She doesn't know how long it's been when Lucas walks in. She's guessing fifteen minutes, because the tears are no longer hot, and its puddles are about the size of coffee coaster. Her fingers still aren't prune-y.  
  
She quickly tries to eliminate all evidence of her having deeper emotions than twenty four hour cynicism.  
  
He catches her, unfortunately, sits down beside her. She has selective hearing, his words don't register quite as clearly as the image of Nathan's face does. Not his hopeful face she's so in love with, it's a guilty one with uneasy eyes. She needs someone to talk to, but tonight is really not the night, seeing as how she has a research paper on a lesser known African country due in two days.  
  
"Good night," he says, and she thinks, 'like hell it was', but she gives him the appropriate response anyway.  
  
She's sure it's been less than five minutes the second time, because there was only one tear to be seen, but there's a tapping at the glass door. She turns and focuses on a hazy image with dark hair. It turns out to be Nathan, and the butterflies-in-stomach-tingling-sensation-and-other-dumb-symptoms-of-love are supressed by the immense amount of hatred she feels instead.  
  
She could let him in. She's always been a sucker for that baby face, the one he's making right. Now. And how could she turn him away, he's calling out to her, 'please, let me explain!' which she knows will involve cups of hot chocolate. And, at that point in her dreams, he would say something like, 'Haley, the only person I care about, is you,' and then he'd lean over and kiss her.   
  
She won't let herself do it, though. There's too much riding on it. Her pride. Dignity. Self control and 'fool me once, shame on you, fool my twice, shame on me'.  
  
She's Haley James before all else. She's not Ms. Nathan Scott or Lucas' one girl posse, or Peyton's newest charity case or Brooke's target, or her mother's 4.0 GPA angel.  
  
She's Haley James. No matter how much, sometimes, she wishes she wasn't.  
  
She could.  
  
But she won't.  
  
-Fin-  
  
----  
  
Reviews are to die for. 


End file.
